November 30, 2002

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

ULFPORT, Miss., Nov. 27 — James Petty has field whips, house whips, shackles, tombstones, forks carved by slaves, cigar-box guitars plucked by them, sales deeds and branding irons.

After years of banging on farmhouse doors and picking through estate sales, Mr. Petty has just about everything he needs for a slavery museum. Except the museum.

Despite assembling one of the largest collections of slavery-era artifacts, 15,000 pieces, Mr. Petty, a California transplant and former radio talk show host, cannot seem to find the right home for his collection — especially in Mississippi.

"People need to know the true story of slavery," Mr. Petty said. "Not the mint julep version."

But in Gulfport, the beach and casino town where Mr. Petty lives, few seem to want to hear. Several schools and other institutions here have declined to house the exhibition.

In September, Mr. Petty, 44, and his wife, Mary Anne, organized a small exhibition in a Gulfport casino. A few hundred people came. But Mr. Petty said he suspected more would have liked to have visited.

Among blacks in Gulfport, "there is serious reluctance to endorse this," said Rip Daniels, chief executive of American Blues Network, which distributes nationally syndicated radio shows out of Gulfport. "It's not so much the Pettys are white, though that may bother some people. It's that folks are scared of retaliation from their employers if they show too much black pride."

Much of Southern slave history has disappeared, lost to time, neglect and shame. But give Mr. Petty, who has a salesman's flourish and an accountant's appetite for numbers, five minutes and he can build a record of America's peculiar institution on his kitchen table.

"Look at this," he says, holding up a photograph from 1865 of a recently freed young man with fire in his eyes. "See the anger?"

Then he opens a steel box and extracts a branding iron.

"They used to stamp this on your forehead," Mr. Petty says. "Or the inner thigh."

Historians who have examined his collection are impressed.

"Nowhere is there anything like this," said Howard Jones, the University of Alabama professor who wrote the history "Mutiny on the Amistad," later turned into a movie. "It is the most comprehensive collection of slavery artifacts I have ever seen."

Shelley Ritter, a curator at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, said, "This is stuff you have heard about but you just don't see."

The mayor of Gulfport, Ken Combs, who is white, said he supported what the Pettys are calling the Middle Passage Museum. He said he was looking for a location, with one possibility being an abandoned winery downtown.

He acknowledged that some people have shied away from the project because they do not want Mississippi viewed as backward and racist, and Mr. Combs, who did not visit the exhibition at the casino, has not offered any financing.

The United States has no museum on slavery, at least not yet. There are several projects in the works, including a plan by L. Douglas Wilder, the former Virginia governor and grandson of a slave, to build a $200 million museum in Fredericksburg.

Mr. Petty has had some interest from officials in Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala. But he wants to keep his collection in Mississippi, saying that is where it is needed most.

This month, residents of Harrison County, which includes Gulfport, voted in a referendum to keep a Confederate flag on a public beach. Last year, Mississippians voted to keep the Confederate battle emblem on the state flag.

"We're still fighting civil rights here," Mr. Petty said.

His crusade, as a white man, to build a slavery museum raises several touchy questions.

"It's very, very sensitive," Dr. Jones said. "Some people regard this history as their history."

Mr. Petty started his collection with a button. Eleven years ago, he was in an Alabama antiques shop when he saw a pewter button with the name T. H. Porter stamped on it. Porter was an infamous slave trader who made his property wear buttons with his name.

"The arrogance," Mr. Petty said. "That's what struck me."

After that, Mr. Petty, who at the time was the host of a local radio talk show geared to gamblers, began scouring the South for similar pieces. But slavery artifacts are very hard to find.

"It's not so easy to go up to an old house and bang on the door and ask folks if their family has any branding irons," he said.

His big break came last year when he found his first branding iron. It was listed on eBay. The owner was an old man in Georgia, who wishes to remain anonymous.

Mr. Petty bought the iron for $900, but the man, an avid antiques collector, had thousands more slavery keepsakes. As Mr. Petty tells it, he impressed the man with his enthusiasm for a museum focused on the middle passage, the journey from Africa to America. Mr. Petty purchased many objects — slave shoes, trade beads, tambourines made from sticks and tin cans — all at low cost.

The Pettys, who cannot pay for a museum themselves — they are living off their savings and the modest proceeds from the few exhibitions they have held — are now looking for a permanent place for their collection and a few hundred thousand dollars for a traveling exhibition.

"We'd love to bring the collection here," said Gary Cox, Atlanta's deputy chief operating officer, who has met with the Pettys. "With all of our civil rights museums, a slavery exhibit would be the perfect complement."

But Mr. Petty's dream is to open a freestanding museum. Already, he is mapping out the gallery space, at least in his mind.

"You'd walk in and you'd be standing on a beach of white sand, the West Coast of Africa," he said. "And this part of the museum the heat would be at 100 degrees. And you'd step into the slave ship and smell the smells and hear the screams."

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